By his flowering we remember Timm (seventh anniversary)

Remembering Timm

For this eighth anniversary of Timm’s passing, I celebrate that we’re all still here to remember it—Dad, Mom, Will, Molly, myself—that his memory is still strong for the hearts and minds which remain after Timm was lost.

If it’s true that death ends the person but not the relationship, then we still have this garden of Timm’s we can tend together—to cherish the pale sweet flower of his time with us—and be nourished and, yes, even healed by its beauty.

Time is a mystery, it passes so fast and yet slowly; was it just yesterday that we woke to the awful news of Timm’s death? Or has it been eight or eighty years of wondering how sad that he left us so soon? And what of the long tide of grief as it waxes and wanes in smoothing pulses, riptided by sudden surgencies, eventually become a still water somewhere permanent in the heart in which we can still see his face?

We’ve been busy since then with other losses, most recently the death of cousin Frank’s son at age 25. We’ve gathered with family and friends to cry and laugh together and remember. You’d think that practice would make us better at grief; but each time, no matter how close or far the relation was, the sudden complete sense of loss never gets easier. How little we learn how to comfort those whose grief is most intense—what can one ever say?

How much we’ve come to know that grief is intensely private, an experience harrowed by achingly lonely hours. And yet grief is communal, too; we learn there is a certain solace we can offer to those who are grieving, if only because we, too, have lost ones we love so much. Sharing a grief is like helping to carry a burden, and the grieving do walk on together ….

Tending Timm’s memorial here on this day is thus an homage to the history and mystery of grief, the pain that also heals, becomes a permanence in the part of the heart that becomes full for all that is has been so deeply felt.

On the lintel of the door Timm passed through I still see the phrase “Beauty heals.”  He could never have known how enduring that adage could be, the title of a set of photo postcards he once hoped to market, adding this:

With all the pain that this life can bring,,

we must never forget that there is still beauty.

It quiets. It excites. It heals.

It touches something deep within.

It is with this in mind

that I share these photographs with you.

And so it is with that in mind that I share Timm's flowers with you again.

Miss you, brother ---

MY BROTHER’S FLOWERS

November 2008

Cool and windy this morning,

deepening a late-of-year dark,

a harrow which hollows the bones

of the oaks knocking in the breeze.

How is it that your

flowers still burn on here,

flickering in the crown

above their halcyon tapers,

writing papery fragrances

like love poems beyond the dark?

Luxurious, lurid, dreamy, wild,

their wide-eyed astonishments

fix your gaze back right here

to where the day unfolds,

one cat curled in my lap, the

other sleeping on a blanket on the couch,

the hour rowing toward dawn:

And me singing loud and happy

of you because of the flowers

you found and framed are like

a window onto the dancing world,

pirouetting in stillness,

petalling forever a smile

which is yours and mine now,

the world’s own rapture

unfurling you again

full-blossomed now to God.